Businesses are driven by being able to answer qualitative questions using quantitative measures. Unfortunately, the conversion of qualitative queries to quantitative answers is typically accomplished via manual intervention and human guesswork. Therefore, the resulting reports contain a mixture of data presented after significant human analysis.
Typically, most current systems that try to answer qualitative questions use static forms that extract data from databases or other data repositories. These static forms are designed by domain experts who know what data sets are relevant to each question and what format to present the answers. Unfortunately, all systems based on static forms are limited in the answers they can provide and they can only answer the questions that are specified by the domain expert and the form designers.